


Pretense

by SilenceoftheSolitude



Series: The Journey [1]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Character Study, Episode Related, F/M, Gen, Original Character(s), Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-21 17:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3701313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilenceoftheSolitude/pseuds/SilenceoftheSolitude
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam has learnt about pretending from her father.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretense

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. No copyright infringement intended.
> 
> Any comment (positive or negative - especially if constructive criticism) is very much appreciated as it helps me improve.
> 
> A big thank you to my wonderful beta, Kalinysta, whose help and dedication is more than anyone could ever wish for.

**The Journey**

 

Life isn't about the final moments, it's about the journey, it's about the process. - J. Michael Straczynski

 

**Part 1: Pretense**

 

 

_It’s easier to pretend to be perfect than be yourself and let people realize you’re a mess._  
  


 

Sam has learnt about pretending from her father.

  
She is eleven when she first realizes that, although her parents always seem to be on the same page apropos of anything ever discussed in front of their kids, there are many topics on which they hold a difference of opinion. The fact that they are arguing about her and that they have no clue she is around makes her think that maybe, just maybe, sometimes pretending isn’t about protecting others from the truth, but about protecting yourself from dealing with reality. Had they really wanted to keep their dispute private they would have closed the door and made sure she wasn't around. But she is around and she can hear their loud, angry whispers.

  
In the end, she decides that she wants to try her hand at pretending too, just to see if she can pull it off.

  
That evening, at dinner, when her parents bring up the summer camp she notices how her father's face is tight, as if he's ready to explode. His opinion on the matter doesn't really need to be voiced for her to understand it. She tells them she has changed her mind, she tells them she doesn’t really care and it was a stupid suggestion to begin with.

  
She spends the week she is supposed to be in camp packing her stuff to bring to the new home in California. She spends her summer pretending that’s exactly what she wanted to do all along. And it doesn't hurt a bit when she finds out that she succeeded in fooling her parents. She's learned something new, after all. Pretending will be more useful than anything that math camp could have taught her.

  
She knows her father never has nightmares because she has spent many nights awake staring at the ceilings of unfamiliar bedrooms and never once has she heard a noise that would indicate restlessness coming from her parents' room, and in the mornings he always looks refreshed and ready to go to work. He only ever looks tired when he comes home very late after a meeting that dragged on for too long.

  
That's why she is quite startled when she comes home earlier, she doesn't feel too well and so decided to skip her afternoon extra-curricular activities, to find her Dad tossing and turning on the couch, sweat staining his balding head and sticking his white t-shirt to his chest. She is mesmerized by the way his eyes move quickly and restlessly under his closed lids, and can't bring herself to look away. She notices that, despite his fitful movements, he manages not to fall from the couch. But when she detects the slight shift in his breathing pattern and the way he suddenly becomes overly alert, she decides to back out from the room and run upstairs.

  
She realizes that he has not produced a single sound from his mouth and reconsiders her previous long-lived assessment, an assurance, really, of her father's sleeping patterns. Maybe he does have nightmares every single night and is just good enough to hide it in front of his kids. She wonders why he decides to carry that much weight on his shoulders alone. She puzzles over his reasons for not talking to a specialist, knowing the military offers counseling to its officers. But she knows how stubborn her father can be and how his career might take a down-turn if ever someone suspected him to be either mentally unstable or weak, so in the end she stops speculating.

  
_Carters are strong. Carters are tough. Carters never falter._ She repeats the mantra in her head until she starts believing it.

  
By the time her mother is dead and she has to see the psychologist because she’s twelve and she just lost her mother, she’s got pretending down to a T, and though she isn't an artist she feels like one. She says the right thing, sheds a tear and sobs when it feels like she should. And the psychologist is just a young woman who got her degree a month earlier and doesn’t realize Sam is playing her.  When she gets home and tells her father that she was cleared and doesn't need any more sessions he seems relieved, as if a weight has just been lifted from his tired shoulders.

  
Yeah, sometimes pretending is good for those around you too.

 

* * *

 

  
Mark is her younger brother and she knows it’s her duty to look after him, but he only ever liked California and their Uncle Irving, the only relative they have that doesn’t look at them like they are about to break every time they breathe, lives there. So when Mark asks her for her savings to buy a one-way ticket to San Diego, she gives him a little extra and she helps him pack. He has always been stubborn, much more like their father than he would ever feel comfortable admitting, so she chooses not to blame him for the decision.

  
But it hurts that he can’t stick around for his older sister.  Because Mark has always been the only one who knew how much she wasn’t fine after their mother’s death, because Mark was the one that got a split lip for standing up for her when the jokes at school became unbearable, and they had officially already left the school, so who was going to care, anyway?  Because Mark was a solid anchor, if not for his personality, at least for the fact that he gave her a purpose in life.

  
With him she always knew how to behave and where she stood; now she isn’t sure he still wants to be her brother and she’s sure she failed him as a surrogate mother.  The only certainty she has is that there's a rift between them that keeps swallowing every attempt she makes at building bridges.

  
But when he’s out the door before their father is back home from work, freezing his ass off to say goodbye, she squeezes him hard, as if to say that she’s okay with his decision, as if to say she understands and blesses him. She is so damned hurt she thinks she’s bleeding somewhere, but for the first time her brother doesn’t call her on it.

  
She can't tell whether he doesn’t see it or if he just decided that he wants to be selfish and ignores her blatant lie on purpose.

  
She calls him nearly every day, and he’s just as warm as she remembers him being, even with all the distance between them. But somehow she knows that their rapport is no longer the same it was before and she is going to be alone against the world from now on.  That’s why by the time she has to make a choice about her future she doesn’t care enough to remember that Mark hates the Air Force more than he convinced himself he hates their father.  That’s why when she signs the papers that will be the first step to change her life forever she pretends she doesn’t care that Mark's not calling her anymore and that is going to be the hardest thing to accept after their mother’s accident.  That's why she pretends nothing changed and nothing will ever do.

 

* * *

 

  
She decides she wants to spend her three weeks’ summer leave on her second year at the Academy touring Colorado with a backpack on her shoulders and enough money only to buy the bus ticket to get from one city to another and then back to the Base in time. She’s not reckless enough to do the auto-stop, and not because she can’t take care of herself, it’s just that she only trusts herself behind a wheel since her mother died and getting in the bus is going to be hard enough.

  
Her plans come crumbling down when, on her way to Pueblo Reservoir, in the outskirts of Pueblo, she stumbles upon an old workshop and she falls madly in love with a piece of junk that her trained eye recognizes to be a beat-up antique inter-war era Indian motorcycle. She camps outside the workshop for a couple of days, but when no one shows up, she takes the bike and makes her way back to Colorado Springs on foot with the smashed scraps threatening to come apart with every step she takes.

  
It takes her a couple of weeks to get back home because she’s taking some time to enjoy the trip, and it shows when she gets into the first seedy diner she can find and the waiter is skittish around her.  In the end the owner comes out from the kitchen to talk to her, probably having been told she is some kind of street kid or worse, or that she has been attacked or abused by someone, and she has to flash him her Air Force ID to convince him that she’s just an officer-in-the-making in need of a good meal. He makes it free and offers to drive her wherever she needs. Somehow, after long minutes of assuring him that she’s fine, if a bit reckless, she manages to get out of the place alone and to keep going with her Indian in tow.

  
She doesn’t have a house and she knows they won’t let her bring the bike on Base, but she has to stow her new possession somewhere. In the end she settles on renting a storage unit near the airport, which is close enough that she can visit during the shorter vacations. She looks like a presentable and reliable customer in front of the bald, overweight, middle-aged man that shows her the cramped space; she doesn’t have a house and her income is pretty low, but she has a dazzling smile and she didn’t even spend a dollar during her vacation, which accounts for her having some cash.

  
She pays upfront and he gives her a good deal. From then on, only when Cam drags her to the bar the first night of leave does she allow herself to pretend she cares about what people think about her more than she treasures her Indian. That bike is like a diamond encased in rocks, a great potential hidden beneath layers of dirt.

  
In a way, she and Cam have something in common, his father was in the Air Force and he followed in the footsteps. But his family is not as dysfunctional as hers and she decides that she doesn’t want to share her troubles with him. She tells him her mother is dead, but she never talks about Mark and her father’s job is enough of an excuse for the fact that she has met both of Cam’s parents on several occasions and he has never met Jacob. She knows if she allows herself to, Cam’s folks would probably treat her as their own. Apparently, 'adopting' children with troubled pasts is a common occurrence where they come from. When Cam hints at that, she decides to slowly yet assuredly distance herself from him.

  
Sometimes life is easier if you don’t have to pretend at all.

  
She only has her bike from there on. And it doesn’t matter that the metal is scratched and opaque, nor that she is missing the speedometer and the keys to make it start; the engine’s absence tops all those things, anyway.

  
What she cares about is that she has an Indian and Sam knows the bike is going to stay with her for as long as she lives, wherever she might find herself in life.

 

* * *

 

  
She doesn’t know anyone when she gets assigned to her first flight squadron. She aced all the test flights and she broke all records at the Academy, but she also knows that she is inexperienced and her reflexes, good as they might be, won’t do her much good if she doesn’t hone them. She’s a burden to the team until she gets in a real fight and proves to herself that she can make it, that she has what it takes to fly.

  
She is also the only woman in her squadron, and though it’s not a great surprise, that fact means she has to learn how to be one of the guys before she finds herself alone and becomes a real liability for the team; if you don’t know your team, you can’t rely on them.

  
Picking up the jargon is the easiest part, a bunch of curses in any sentence, except when you talk to your superiors, and you’re good. She can even laugh at the dirty jokes convincingly enough for the others to buy in on her act. What she finds a little harder is forgetting that she is a woman.

  
Oddly enough, it’s when she is reminded that she is that she finally gets to be part of the team.

 

 

  
Flash – a nickname that suits Matt Sims extremely well (he is fast and likes running from one place to another.  He shares in Jay Garrick's humor and he keeps a stash of comic books under his cushion) is laying on his bed while the others are already on their way to the local bar, and gives no sign of wanting to get up anytime soon. He has possibly been the kindest of them all with her during her stay, and she knows he likes to party. With the prospect of this being one of the last occasions he has of relaxing before they get assigned to Operation Desert Storm - it's only a matter of time before more squadrons get assigned there - she can't come up with a convincing reason for him to be sprawled on his bunk.

  
“What’s up?”

  
He turns around and opens his eyes. He seems startled to find her here, “aren’t you supposed to be out?”

  
“Aren’t you?” she retorts. Not a single one of their teammates would have taken the time to stop and inquire.

  
He gives her a grin that is a hundred percent delighted for her concern. “My folks are supposed to call me,” he explains. “Mom can’t sleep without talking to me and I can’t call them because they’re somewhere on vacation.”

  
She never pegged Flash to be the sentimental type, but she is smart enough to figure out that his mother is not the only reason why he is laying in the bunk waiting for the call. She sits right next to him and makes his wait less boring by trading stories and playing card games she never knew before. The others would have goaded him into joining them and left once they got rejected one time too many, but she is glad she stayed; Flash is a good guy and _really_ getting to know him might be the best thing that happened to her in a while.

  
It doesn’t take long for her and Flash to become as close as the Air Force’s rulebook allows, and it takes even less for him to suggest that she needs a nickname if she wants to be a ‘proper flyboy’. Of course, everybody refuses to use her surname as a basis on which to build it; they’re an inventive little bunch.

  
As the squadron leader, Major McMillan, who is a Scot through and through and earned himself the surname of ‘Wallace’ when he was still a young Lieutenant, takes the duty upon himself and picks a nickname Sam will never use once she’s done flying, but one that she loves dearly. It’s not particularly inventive or special, but it’s hers and it’s hard-earned so she is proud of it. It’s the first tangible proof she has of being accepted as part of the Air Force – her ID notwithstanding.

  
She gets the call sign of Hawkgirl, with plenty of stickers depicting a couple of wings and a bludgeon now on every item she possess "to reinforce the image", according to her teammates. She just knows Flash had a hand in suggesting the nickname.

  
When she questions him about it, he shrugs. "Gotta fight the Marvel's teams somehow..."

  
He's just enough of a nerd to know which characters belong to Marvel and which to DC Comics.

  
The next time she hears from her father she pretends it’s not really that much, but behind the layers of polite-talk they have been reduced to, she likes to think it’s pride she hears in his voice.

 

* * *

 

  
She spends a lot of time convincing herself that she hasn't started her relationship with Pete just to get over her feelings for her CO.

  
When Colonel O'Neill and Teal'c rescue her from the Alpha site, she tells herself his arm around her is not meant to be anything more than two soldiers sharing the comfort of knowing they just escaped a life-or-death situation, and she believes that to be true. That Teal'c conveniently decides to stand guard over the Kull Warrior as she leans into the Colonel's hold is something she has no control over.  Besides, Teal'c is the living proof that she doesn't always seek the Colonel's comfort. She elects not to take into account that the only times she doesn't is when the Colonel is lost or dying.

  
When Janet dies and they hug on Base it's only because she has just lost her best friend and the Colonel nearly died too. She only needs to know he is alive and to do that she has to feel him, touch him, hold him. He is the one that initiates it too, even if she knows he does it mostly – if not entirely – for her benefit.

  
When he sacrifices himself – for the nth time – to save Earth, and possibly the galaxy, from Anubis; when he says dying would be a fair bargain to save them all; when he tells her she's a natural resource if not a national treasure, well, then she can't really kid herself about her feelings for him anymore.

  
That does, in no way, mean that she doesn't work hard to try to fool everybody else.

  
He spends three months frozen in Antarctica and she devotes that entire time to working as hard as she can to find a way to bring him back. She continuously makes sure that all the political conflicts regarding the outpost don't interfere with the Colonel's safety. She wakes up nearly every morning in her Base quarters, uncaring about the state of her house, but making sure his is well-cared for.  She picks up neurology manuals and studies the Tok'ra's memory devices. She even picks up all the reports on the Za'tarc technology, as painful as the memories involving it are, to try and see if they can remove the Ancient's database from the Colonel's mind just as Anise managed to remove the Goa'uld's conditioning on later individuals subjected to the conditioning.

  
Once that's exhausted she goes back to Ma'chello's body-swapping machine. It affected the neuro conduits of two individual's brains and she thinks about using it to change O'Neill's cerebral pathways to match those he had before the repository was downloaded into his brain. They took more than a couple MRIs of the Colonel close to the time before his brain was scrambled. Unfortunately no amount of work on the machine brings home any results. The notes are still a mystery to her and even Daniel doesn't seem to be able to decipher the language. If he was capable of that, then maybe she could work on its coding.

  
Sam is close to losing hope, or maybe she already relinquished it and is simply refusing to admit it, when Dr. Weir finally enters her office.

  
Sam is not so sure which day it is, let alone the time, but she knows she's been going back and forth from the SGC to Area 51 to raise even the unaware Dr. Weir's suspicion about her motives.

  
Sam has yet to form an opinion on the civilian now running the Base. It's hard to judge someone when she's barely taking the time to eat and sleep and working herself to death. The diplomat has the advantage of having allowed SG-1 to actually go on that mission that saved Earth and made the Colonel's sacrifice, if not less unbearable, at least meaningful.

  
Sam's eyes are burning. She should probably apply some eyedrops to make them less dry than the Mojave Desert, but if she goes to the infirmary Dr. Brightman will probably order her off-Base for a couple of days minimum, and if she goes to a pharmacy she'll lose a lot of time she wants to dedicate to the rescue of Jack O'Neill. Neither option is acceptable.

  
"Major Carter. "

  
The sound of another human's voice sounds alien after the couple of days she has spent holed up in her lab.

  
"Dr.  Weir," Sam's tone is neither inviting nor despondent. She doesn't much care for conversation, but she knows she has to respond to Dr.  Weir's orders, whatever those may be, so she tries not to antagonize her.

  
"I just came from a briefing with Dr.  Jackson."

  
Sam nods, unsure as to what she is supposed to say.

  
"At the end of our talk I asked him if he was aware of any progress on your end."

  
Sam flinches. Daniel has a big mouth, which probably means he said a lot of things he wasn't supposed to. "He wouldn't be. I haven't seen him in a couple of days." She checks the date on her computer and barely suppresses the urge to widen her eyes in disbelief. It's been a week since she last spoke with her teammate.

  
"So he told me." Dr. Weir approaches her work bench cautiously and assumes an expression that is a bit too knowing for Sam's liking. "Listen, Major, I'm not saying you have to stop working. And I'm not even going to pretend I comprehend the deep bonds that connect the members of SG-1 to Colonel O'Neill–"

  
"I sense a 'but' coming," Sam cuts in giving voice to the part of her thought-pattern that sounds distinctly like Colonel O'Neill, the part she's allowing to grow because she misses his constant presence by her side.

  
"But," Dr. Weir stresses, "you won't do him any good if you can't think straight."

  
"With all due respect, Ma'am," Sam says, disregarding the fact that Dr. Weir doesn't warm to the title as any military officer may. "My mind is working just fine, and the lack of solutions for the Colonel's condition isn't in any way related to any alleged lack of focus."

  
"I wasn't suggesting that, Major, but you haven't left this Base since your return from Area 51 more than a week ago."

  
"I have quarters on Base like any other officer," Sam answers defensively.

  
"Do I need to pull the video feed to know how much sleep you have actually–"

  
"With all due respect, _Ma'am_..." the word sounding all but the honorific it is meant to be, "Colonel O'Neill is in that machine because he didn't want any of his teammates to get the knowledge of the Ancients downloaded into their brains. And to tell you the truth, while the decision to prevent Daniel from doing that himself was wise, I can't find a single reason for him to choose himself over me. None that makes tactical sense, anyway," she adds in a breath that is too revealing for her likings.

  
Sam's tired of pretending she doesn't feel guilty, she's tired of pretending his words helped her reconcile with his decision, she's tired of pretending it doesn't hurt twice as much that it was him and not her.  She doesn't buy the 'national treasure' line any more than she buys into the Burns-Goa'uld analogy. She feels guilty because he admitted once that he'd rather die than lose her, and though feelings change and the situation was different this time around, she doesn't think it possible that some part of that man hasn't survived long enough to influence the Colonel's decision on that damned planet.

  
"As I understand it, Major," Dr. Weir starts eventually, her tone conciliatory, "you are the one possibility Colonel O'Neill has to get out of Antarctica alive. I may not be a soldier, but the way I see it, the Colonel's decision was the best one – tactically speaking."

  
Sam knows this in the depths of her mind. Yet the knowledge doesn't make it any easier.  She bows her head and when she lifts it, she gives her best smile. "You're right. I'll go home and be back tomorrow morning."

  
Sam will go home and she will come back at an adequate hour. She'll probably even call Pete and tell him she's sorry for being out of contact, but that doesn't mean she thinks any of it is right.

  
She puts on the mask and pretends for a little while longer that there's nothing wrong, that her world keeps turning regularly.

  
She's become a master at pretending.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first work in a series comprised of four parts. All parts have already been written, so you should be able to read everything relatively soon.


End file.
